miércoles, 4 de abril de 2018

The Most Powerful Lobbyist in Trump’s Washington

M. Scott Mahaseky

Hint: It’s not Corey Lewandowski.

By THEODORIC MEYER

When
Brian Ballard signed the lease last year for an office on the second
floor of the Homer Building, a downtown Washington edifice that's home
to a number of lobbying firms, he promised himself he would stay in the
space for five years. He lasted one. In February, his firm, Ballard
Partners, moved into a bigger office on the fourth floor to accommodate
the new lobbyists Ballard has hired since the election of one of his
former clients, President Donald Trump.

At the firm's first
staff meeting in the new offices, Ballard and five of his Washington
lobbyists sat in new leather chairs around a small conference table,
with Ballard at the head. Robert Wexler, a former Democratic congressman
from Florida whom Ballard hired last year, phoned in from Paris with an
update on the firm's work for the Turkish government. Jamie Rubin, a
former assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration,
called from Brussels and updated Ballard on a meeting he'd had with
Moise Katumbi, an exiled opposition leader from the Democratic Republic
of the Congo, who’s a client.

“You'll be happy to hear that we signed the Maldives today,” Syl Lukis, another Ballard lobbyist, told Rubin.

“Let's fire away quickly on Kosovo and Turkey,” Ballard said. (The government of Kosovo is another Ballard client.)

Other
Ballard lobbyists gave updates on their meetings with Trump
administration officials and other work on behalf of the dozens of
clients they represent in Washington, including Amazon, Dish Network,
Uber, Pernod Ricard (the makers of Jameson whiskey and Absolut vodka)
and Trulieve (a Florida-based medical marijuana company). Rebecca Benn, a
former congressional staffer Ballard hired last year, updated Ballard
and another lobbyist, Susie Wiles, on a meeting she'd set up for a
client. “They were very, very happy — thank you, Susie — for the meeting
at the White House last week,” Benn said. “It went very, very well.”

Ballard
is a veteran Florida lobbyist who’s been in Washington for barely a
year — the blink of an eye in an industry in which many of the top
practitioners have spent decades inside the Beltway. But Ballard is
closer to the president than perhaps any other lobbyist in town. He’s
parlayed that relationship into a booming business helping clients get
their way with the Trump administration — and his clients and even some
of his rivals say his firm has a better grasp of what’s going on in the
West Wing than almost anyone else on K Street. Ballard was one of the
top fundraisers in the country for Trump’s campaign and continues to
raise millions for his reelection campaign. Wiles, one of his top
lieutenants, ran Trump’s campaign in Florida and delivered the nation’s
biggest swing state to the president.

Ballard's relationship
with Trump has helped him solve a lucrative puzzle that has frustrated
more established players. For all of the president’s “drain the swamp”
rhetoric, the new administration has given corporate America and its
lobbyists the opportunity to revive dreams of tax cuts, regulatory
rollbacks and rule changes that were mothballed during the Obama
administration. But Trump also presents a challenge for the influence
business — a White House in which key positions at least initially were
as likely to be staffed by Trump loyalists as by old Washington hands
with ties to K Street. Ballard has helped to bridge the gap. He’s a
Trump-friendly out-of-towner who can connect with the establishment — he
is a close ally of Senator Marco Rubio as well as Charlie Crist, the
former centrist Republican governor of Florida who is now a Democratic
congressman — and make corporate clients comfortable.

Ballard
isn't the only person in Trump’s orbit who decided to try his or her
luck in Washington. Campaign veterans from Corey Lewandowski, Trump's
fired-but-never-forgotten campaign manager, on down have flocked to “the
swamp” to lobby the administration — or, in Lewandowski's case, to
offer clients a glimpse into Trump's thought process without actually
registering to lobby. But Ballard appears to have landed the biggest
fish. He has signed more than 60 clients since setting up shop in
Washington after Trump’s inauguration, including blue-chip companies
like American Airlines and Sprint. Those clients paid Ballard nearly $10
million last year for help navigating Trump's first year in office.
(Those numbers don't include the $3.1 million the firm says it brought
in representing foreign clients such as Turkey and the Dominican
Republic.)

“He’s the only guy that’s done it,” said Robert
Stryk, a lobbyist who runs in the same circles as some former Trump
campaign hands and moved to Washington himself after the election.
(Stryk's company, SPG, bills itself as a “private diplomacy” firm rather
than a traditional lobbying shop.)

Lobbyists at some of
Washington’s established firms are quick to praise Ballard, but they
also wonder how long his success can last, given the unique nature of
the Trump administration. There are risks to building a shop around one
principal’s relationships. The now-defunct firms of Ed Gillespie, who
was one of Washington’s most powerful lobbyists during George W. Bush’s
administration, or Tony Podesta, who thrived under Barack Obama, might
be regarded as cautionary tales. “Brian is building a strong Washington
office, but the question is what happens when the circus leaves town,”
one Republican lobbyist with close ties of his own to the administration
told me.

Unlike Lewandowski, who hasn't been able to
resist boasting about his relationship with Trump as he hustles for
clients, Ballard has taken pains to avoid the appearance of cashing in
on his relationship with the president. He refuses to speak on the
record about how often he talks with the president. But his clients say
he's been able to figure out how the Trump administration works in a way
no one else has. For now, at least, it’s working for him.

***

Trump
called Ballard in the days before he announced he would run for
president. The two men have known each other for nearly 30 years.
Ballard met Trump after picking up a copy of The Art of the Deal in the
1980s. He read the book and was so struck by it that he wrote Trump a
letter telling him how much he'd enjoyed it. “I loved the idea of
15-minute meetings,” Ballard told me years later. “That's one of the
things in the book that still stands out to me.” He later told the
Orlando Sentinel that he didn't believe in meetings that lasted any
longer. Trump wrote “this beautiful letter” back, Ballard says, and they
kept in touch.

Ballard ended up working on and off as Trump’s
Florida lobbyist, helping the Trump Organization negotiate state and
local government when issues came up with Trump’s Doral golf club. A
decade before Trump announced his presidential run, Ballard helped
orchestrate a fundraiser in 2005 at Trump Tower in Manhattan for Crist’s
campaign for Florida governor. “A friend told me about his record,”
Trump told the St. Petersburg Times at the time, referring to Crist. “I
checked him out. I met him, I liked him, and I said I could help.”

Ballard,
like most of Florida's Republican establishment, backed Jeb Bush in the
primary, but when Trump called he offered to do what he could for his
client. In September, as it became clear that Trump's lead in the polls
wasn't going away, Ballard dispatched Wiles to New York to meet with
Trump. Wiles was named the Trump campaign's Florida co-chairwoman a few
weeks later.

It took months for Ballard himself to come around
to Trump. He jumped ship first to Rubio’s campaign and signed on with
Trump only once it was clear he would be the Republican nominee. But
once he was in, Ballard proved a valuable asset. Florida is home to lots
of of wealthy Republican donors, and Ballard knew most of them after
raising money for John McCain and Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns.
Trump named Ballard his Florida finance chairman, and Ballard raised
millions for his campaign. He spoke with Trump often and traveled on the
campaign plane with him. The effort also put him in close touch with
Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee chairman who would be
tapped as White House chief of staff, and Steven Mnuchin, the campaign's
finance chairman, who’s now treasury secretary. Trump spent more time
in Florida in the general election than in any other state. And
“whenever we did an event in Florida I was there,” Ballard said.

Ballard
watched the election returns come in with Lukis at an apartment he
keeps in Manhattan. They didn’t know whether Trump would win — although
Wiles later said she was confident he would pull it off — but they hoped
he’d at least carry Florida. When it became clear Trump would become
president, they high-fived and walked over to the victory party. The
calls from clients started the next day. “To say they were freaking out
is absolutely maybe even an understatement,” Wiles said.

Some
Trump campaign hands almost immediately began trying to figure out
whether they would be working in the new administration or lobbying it.
Ballard, who was raising money for the inaugural committee, moved more
slowly, waiting to open his Washington office until after the
inauguration. (His firm began representing a half dozen federal clients
before Trump took office, according to disclosure filings, but Ballard
says he didn’t do any lobbying until later). Within three months of the
inauguration, though, Ballard had signed two dozen clients, not just
Amazon and American Airlines, but also Prudential and the GEO Group, a
private prison operator.

Many early clients were companies
Ballard already represented in Florida. Those clients beget more
clients. “We started representing Dish [Network],” Ballard said. “They
referred us to MGM, who referred us to H&R Block, who’s referring us
to another client right now.” Signing high-profile corporate clients
helped Ballard lobbyists get meetings with Trump administration
officials, which helped him snag more clients. No one screened Ballard’s
calls during his first months in Washington, so he ended up turning
away some “squirrely” would-be clients himself: people who wanted to
lobby the State Department to buy their patents, bitcoin speculators,
people with “some really weird gold issues.” “If it’s anyone who says I
want to pay you to set up a meeting with the president or whatever, we
just say no out of hand,” Ballard said. “We end that conversation. We
don’t do that stuff.”

Brian Ballard, photographed March 13, 2018, at his office in Washington, D.C.

Ballard
isn’t the only Washington lobbyist who has a personal relationship with
Trump. Dave Urban, a veteran lobbyist who helped Trump carry
Pennsylvania, is also widely believed to be close to the president. But
Ballard’s clients say many other Republican lobbyists in town haven’t
figured out how to negotiate the Trump administration more than a year
into his presidency.

“I’ll be very honest about this: I still
don’t feel this town has caught up," Richard Haselwood, a lobbyist for
one of Ballard's clients, the tobacco giant Reynolds American, said one
night in February as he sipped a martini. Ballard, Wiles and I, along
with a couple of other Ballard lobbyists, had met Haselwood for drinks
at Mastro's, a steakhouse across the street from Ballard's Washington
office (and three blocks east of the White House) that’s become enough
of a haunt for Ballard lobbyists that they've started to learn the names
of the waitresses.

Congressman Matt Gaetz dropped by the table,
cocktail in hand. Gaetz, a baby-faced freshman from Florida, is closer
to Trump than most House Republicans. He’s flown on Air Force One and is
a frequent presence defending Trump on Fox News, CNN and MSNBC, which
has gotten the president’s attention. Gaetz has bragged that Trump
sometimes calls him
when he gets off the air. But even Gaetz sometimes needs help from
Ballard lobbyists to get what he wants from the West Wing. “Even as a
friend of the president who speaks frequently with the president,
sometimes I have to call Susie Wiles to get my way,” he said.

Haselwood
was one of a number of lobbyists for Ballard’s Florida clients who
urged him in the weeks after the election to consider setting up shop in
Washington. Reynolds American, like other big companies, was struggling
to figure out how to negotiate what would soon be Trump’s Washington.
Haselwood recalled Ballard being mobbed at the Republican Governors
Association meeting in Orlando the week after the election. “Everyone is
down there,” he said. “No one knew what was going on. Brian came in and
people were, like, rushing to him.”

Ballard has helped clients
like Reynolds map out who’s really calling the shots in Trump’s
administration, where aides and even Cabinet members can be influential
one week and out of favor the next. “Brian jumped in and jumped in big,
and I’m thrilled,” Haselwood added. “I’d feel naked without him.”

***

Ballard
spent nearly two decades figuring out how to dine and golf with
Florida’s governors without abusing his relationships with them. He told
the St. Petersburg Times a decade ago that he avoided lobbying Crist
unless the governor’s staffers were present. “I don’t sneak it in while
we're shooting the breeze,” Ballard told the paper. “It doesn't work
that way. It would be gross.”

He grew up in Delray Beach,
Florida, one of six children raised by a single mother. He got his start
in politics at 24, when he took time off from law school to work as a
travel aide and driver to Tampa Mayor Bob Martinez, a Republican waging a
long-shot campaign for governor. When Martinez won, Ballard moved to
Tallahassee to work for him and traded in his 1980 Toyota Tercel for a
silver BMW. By the time the Orlando Sentinel profiled him
in 1990, Ballard was the governor’s chief of staff and had just married
Kathryn Smith, the daughter of Florida Secretary of State Jim Smith, in
what another newspaper called “Tallahassee's wedding of the year.”
(George Steinbrenner, a future Ballard client, was a guest.) The
Sentinel profile recounted Ballard yukking it up on the phone with Jeb
Bush — who was chairman of Martinez's reelection campaign — and
described him as the “brat-savant of Florida politics.”

Martinez
lost reelection in 1990 to Lawton Chiles, a Democrat, and Ballard stuck
around Tallahassee as a lobbyist. It wasn't an easy time to start out
as a Republican lobbyist: Democrats held majorities in both chambers of
the Florida Legislature and the governorship. But Republicans won
control of the Florida Senate in 1994 and took the House two years
later. And in 1998, Ballard’s old pal Jeb Bush was elected governor.

A
few weeks after the election, the Ledger of Lakeland, Florida, reported
that Ballard's firm — called Smith, Ballard, Bradshaw and Logan at the
time — had something other Tallahassee lobbying firms “only wish they
could claim: an undeniably special relationship with Bush that is being
cautiously defended.” Ballard brashly told the paper his firm had no
more access to Bush than anyone else. “Anyone who thinks that when they
are hiring us they have secured some special niche in the administration
is wrong and should save their money,” Ballard said. “Don't hire us. Go
somewhere else.”

Despite his protestations at the time, Ballard
proved remarkably successful over the next two decades at cultivating
friendships with Florida's Republican governors. He was an early
supporter of Crist’s successful campaign to succeed Bush. When Rick
Scott, a former hospital executive, beat the candidate Ballard was
backing in the Republican primary to replace Crist, Ballard hustled to
win him over, raising enough money for Scott’s general-election campaign
that Scott named him chairman of his inaugural committee after he won.
Ballard also hired the woman who’d managed Scott’s dark-horse campaign:
Wiles, who would help Trump win Florida six years later. Mac
Stipanovich, a longtime Republican lobbyist in Florida who hired Ballard
to work on the Martinez campaign three decades ago, said Ballard has
had “private, mansion-dinner relationships with every governor of
Florida since” Bush. (The two men remain friends even though Stipanovich
claims to “hate Trump worse than a snake.”)

Ballard is 56, with
a tanned face and slightly sandy brown hair. He splits his time between
Tallahassee, New York and Washington these days, but he retains
something of a Florida air about him. When I met him at his office one
morning in January, he wore a blue suit, a bright white shirt open at
the collar and loafers. Lobbyists who know Ballard in Florida say he can
be intensely competitive, but in person he's warm and laughs easily.
Unlike many other Washington lobbyists, he doesn't seem like he's trying
to ingratiate himself with you.

“I think the fastest way to get
shut out is to start talking about who you can influence and who you
can’t influence,” Lukis, a Ballard managing partner who moved to
Washington after the election to open the new office, said over
breakfast one morning at the Old Ebbitt Grill. "I don’t even like the
word ‘influence.’ I’m not trying to influence anybody. What I’m trying
to do is to have input into the ultimate decision-making process that’s
being made regarding the issue that we’re working on. And I’d just as
soon talk to a staffer than I would the secretary, because I think
ultimately if you can get the staff to agree with you, 98 percent of the
time you’re probably going to get the secretary to agree with you.”

If
Ballard hadn't helped to elect Trump, it’s easy to imagine he might be
one of the many Republican lobbyists in Washington who aren't enamored
of the president. He's raised money and professed admiration over the
years for several Republicans who have been harsh Trump critics: Jeb
Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney. He's occasionally even given to
Democrats, including his old friend Crist, who became an independent
during his failed Senate campaign in 2010 and is now a Democratic
congressman. “Brian is a fairly moderate Republican, I think I would
say,” Crist said when I asked him what it was like to be on the other of
the partisan divide from Ballard. “So it’s fine.” He laughed.

Ballard
has taken criticism from Republicans who would have rather seen Hillary
Clinton elected than Trump. It’s cost him friendships. After the
“Access Hollywood” tape came out late in the campaign, he said, “I can
recall a very active Republican that I was trying to get to help at an
event after that asking me if I was ashamed of myself.” No, not at all,
he replied. “No one's going to be fooled by electing Donald Trump,” he
told me. “He is what he is.”

If he didn’t know Trump, he might
have ended up as a Trump critic rather than a supporter, he told me.
“But I know him,” he said.

Ballard’s relationship with Trump
isn't all that different from the bonds that hundreds if not thousands
of lobbyists in Washington have with members of Congress they used to
work for. Like Ballard, many lobbyists help sustain those relationships
by giving money and hosting fundraisers for their old bosses’ reelection
campaigns. The difference is that Ballard's relationship is with the
president of United States. Lobbyists and former campaign big shots such
as Lewandowski had it particularly easy in the first months of the
administration, before John Kelly replaced Priebus as chief of staff and
cracked down on outside access to Trump. “You were walking in, you were
having dinner,” said a lobbyist for one of Ballard's clients, who
estimated Ballard talks with Trump every few weeks. “It was like dealing
with a Senate office or a small-time governor.”

***

Ballard
won't talk about what he does for his clients, for the most part. He
made an exception for his work on behalf of Katumbi, the exiled
Congolese opposition leader. Katumbi, who fled the Democratic Republic
of the Congo in 2016 to avoid being thrown in prison
by President Joseph Kabila, hired Ballard to help persuade the Trump
administration to pressure Kabila to allow him to return. Ballard, Lukis
and Katumbi met with a deputy to Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to
the United Nations, in October before Haley traveled to the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, and Haley forcefully called for the country to hold elections this year on her trip.

Not all of Ballard's foreign clients are as sympathetic. Ballard signed a contract
with the Turkish government worth $125,000 a month on May 11, days
before Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s security guards beat up
peaceful protesters outside Turkey's embassy, according to a Justice
Department filing. Another filing shows Ballard met several times with
administration officials on Turkey's behalf, including Sean Cairncross, a
senior adviser to the White House chief of staff, and Matt Mowers, a
State Department official who worked on Trump's campaign.

A photo of President Trump taken on inauguration day on the wall of
Brian Ballard’s new minted offices, photographed March 13, 2018, at his
office in Washington, D.C.

Domestic lobbying filings don't
require the same level of disclosure, and Ballard's are especially
lacking in detail. But they give a sense of the scope of his lobbying
efforts. Ballard Partners has lobbied nearly two dozen federal agencies,
from the Treasury Department to the Army Corps of Engineers, as well as
the White House, Vice President Mike Pence's office and Congress.
Ballard and his partners pulled in $550,000 last year lobbying the White
House and the Justice Department for the GEO Group, the private-prison
operator, which won the administration's first immigrant-detention contract
in April, less than three months after signing Ballard. He lobbied the
Office of the U.S. Trade Representative on behalf of LG, the South
Korean electronics manufacturer, and two solar-panel installation
companies as the administration considered whether to slap tariffs on
imported washing machines and solar panels. And he started lobbying the
White House for Crowley Maritime, a Florida shipping company, four days
after the administration waived the Jones Act in an effort to speed the
delivery of hurricane relief to Puerto Rico. Thomas Crowley, the
company's chief executive, told the Washington Post
at the time that waiving the Jones Act — which requires shipments
between U.S. ports to be carried on American-flagged vessels — wouldn't
help relief efforts. The Jones Act, Crowley added, “is very important to
our company and America's shipping industry.” Trump allowed the waiver
to lapse days later.

The staff at Ballard Partners remains
small, at least compared with how much money Ballard is pulling in. The
firm had just six registered lobbyists handling domestic work in the
fourth quarter of 2017, when it took in $3.6 million. That made it the
No. 17 firm in Washington, ahead of many long-established firms,
according to a POLITICO analysis of lobbying disclosure filings. Peck
Madigan Jones, the No. 16 lobbying firm by revenue, had twice that many
lobbyists.

Ballard insists he wants to build a firm that will
outlast Trump, but some lobbyists are skeptical that he’ll succeed. If
Trump leaves before his term is finished or fails to win reelection, “I
would imagine there would be significant drop-off” in Ballard's
business, a prominent Democratic lobbyist said. “Because it’s a straight
Trump play.”

Still, Ballard wouldn't be the first state-level
lobbyist to make a permanent leap to Washington. The Denver law firm
Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, for instance, opened a Washington
office in 1995 and is now the No. 2 lobbying shop in town by revenue.
Norm Brownstein, the chairman of the firm’s board, told me he admires
what Ballard has achieved so far, before adding, “I believe as long as
[Trump] is president, he will have a great practice.”

Ballard’s
fundraising prowess means he’ll remain valuable to Trump at least
through 2020, the lobbyist for one of Ballard’s clients told me.
Washington lobbyists, of course, have hosted fundraisers and given money
as a way of ingratiating themselves with lawmakers for decades. But
relatively few lobbyists are raising serious money for Trump, whom many
Republicans on K Street freely disparage in private. Ballard is one of
only three lobbyists who's a vice chairman of the Republican National
Committee's fundraising committee. “He’s a ferocious fundraiser. I mean,
if that coffee cup could give money,” Wiles told me over coffee one
morning, gesturing toward a mug on the table. Stipanovich, Ballard's old
friend in Florida, said he was willing to make a prediction: Ballard,
unlike other Trump campaign veterans who have come to Washington, will
be in business long after Trump is out of office. “When Trump is gone,
Lewandowski might as well buy a bed-and-breakfast in Vermont,”
Stipanovich said. “But not Brian.”